EXCERPT
In the so-called dime museums that lined the Bowery in the post-Civil War Big Apple, you could everything from bearded ladies to ‘cures’ for venereal disease.
Alice Sparberg Alexiou is the author of The Devil's Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery. She is also the author of Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary and The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It. She is a contributing editor at Lilith magazine and she blogs for the Gotham Center. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has a Ph.D. in classics from Fordham University. She lives in New York.